1. Technical Field
Present invention embodiments relate to management of digital information, and more specifically, to storage of digital artifacts or items and controlling and tracking access of the stored digital artifacts.
2. Discussion of the Related Art
Currently, numerous artifacts may reside in encrypted files stored on secure servers. The use of a secure server is analogous in several ways to a bank vault containing safe deposit boxes. Once access is obtained into the bank vault, the safe deposit boxes are accessible. Although the contents of each safe deposit box are not readily apparent, the fact that the safe deposit boxes are stored in a vault implicitly renders their contents valuable.
When a secure server is compromised, the method employed by the secure server to track disk allocation and files can be exploited to identify and find artifacts within the compromised secure server. In this case, the last level of defense to safeguard the contents of an artifact is the encryption strategy used to store the artifact contents. However, even this last level of defense presents a potential weakness since an identified artifact becomes a target for a focused attack to defeat the encryption strategy.
Further, the eventual or required disclosure of contents of an artifact may require redacting. The process of redacting contents of sensitive artifacts can lead to an inadvertent disclosure of sensitive information. For example, the redaction process may leave enough information of the artifact to infer sensitive contents.
In addition, tracking the source of a disclosure of content of an artifact is difficult. In particular, once the content of an artifact has been disclosed, identifying the manner in which access to the artifact was obtained and determining the person responsible for the disclosure is complex. In order to ascertain authenticity of an artifact, artifact identifiers must be clearly disclosed which can present even further issues.